


west of memphis

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Dealing With Trauma, Family, M/M, good thing fred andrews is up to the job, jughead is a scared sad kid that needs to be protected, post episode 7, the queer coding in the last episode was really intense when it came to jughead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-10-12 05:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10482864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: he's living with archie but there's only a few suburban walls between his life with fred andrews and a life in prison and his heart is counting the closing distance every day, frantically beating out the inevitability of his conviction, the passing of time bringing him ever closer to the day the sheriff shows back up at the door, noose in hand.





	1. west of memphis

**Author's Note:**

> this was meant to be part of a longer post episode 7 fic but the hiatus is almost over, my writers block is intense, and the more i think about jughead crying in the interrogation room without sharing this the closer i get to exploding. i think the satanic panic reference was my favourite thing to happen so far in the show in terms of jughead's character. plus, i heard whispers that betty/jughead had passed archie/jughead in number of fics on ao3 and this is my attempt to tip the scales. it's definitely gonna become multi chapter. 
> 
> the title refers to the west memphis three, who are the "paradise lost kids" jughead (amazingly) refers to when he's terrified in the interrogation room. it also borrows from "south of salem" a 2016 documentary i have not yet seen personally, but which looks really amazing as well

Tuesday he sits down and mutilates his school notebooks, using a heavy pair of red kitchen scissors to take out any strange doodles, any negative words, any pencilled song lyrics that are less than cheerful. His hands shake as he does it, as the HATE and BORED and I WANT THE ONE I CANT HAVE litter the ground around him like snow, spreading out in a semi-circle as he goes further and further back through everything and anything that can be used to incriminate him.

On one page he finds a sloppy drawing of a gun and winces, the involuntary reflex tearing through his body like the slice of a knife. He remembers drawing it, tucking it carefully at the bottom of his english notes, barely two finger widths long. He’d watched Pulp Fiction the night before. That had been all it meant. It had been a dull, rainy day, his favourite weather, and he had been looking forward to going to the library at lunch to load the soundtrack onto his beat up ipod classic. It had been a good day. He was imagining a future where he was a screenwriter.

This one he takes the time to crumple in his hand, his palms sweaty enough to turn it to mush, the graphite staining his skin. He crumples it until he feels it disintegrate, and then he lets it pour out of his palm, spill over the mess of Good Charlotte lyrics and underlined curse words.

He was a doodler. So what? It was how he focused. The shaking has moved past his hands, into his whole body. He tears the page with the word GAY out so hard he gets a papercut.

Gym class. End of freshman year. He’d bumped into Reggie outside the showers, walking with his eyes on the floor, his forehead colliding with a damp layer of hoodie and a rock-solid chest. Reggie had given him a good look up and down, at the black jeans and ratty shoes, dangling headphones, dark hood, and the phrase had bounced out of his lips as immediately and as forcefully as a ball hitting concrete: “Watch it, _Columbine_.”

He hears it now, hears the harsh laugh that had come next, knows that Reggie’s forgotten it, buried it under a list of yet-to-be-used disparaging nicknames, and still it vibrates through his wrists as he rips pages, echoes in beat with the blood thrumming in his eardrums. He knows it’ll come back to haunt him somehow, knows he’s not done with the fact that those three words had spilled out into the air above his head, landing on him, marking him. The weight of them around his neck.

He comes to the pages from the very beginning of the year, right after Jason’s body had turned up. His indecipherable scrawl of notes and theories leaps up at him in bright black ink, the word MURDER standing out again and again, looking as fresh and raw as a wound.

He pictures Sheriff Keller slapping his algebra notebook face-up in an interrogation room. His elementary school librarian is there. The second-grade teacher who wanted to know who he was cheating off when only he and Dilton got a perfect score on the spelling quiz. Everyone who knew he was from the wrong side of the tracks and would never amount to anything. They look at the oil-slick word, MURDER, and they look up at Keller and they nod.

He keeps cutting. Morrissey lyrics. Rimbaud quotes. A crooked five-pointed star that looks kind of like a pentagram.

 _I’m going to hell_ , he thinks, a bit hysterically, _I’m going to hell or jail or both_.

He should wipe his laptop too. His gaze lands on it from across the room, the charging light blinking blue under Archie’s desk. That was the first thing they’d seize, not his biology notes. They’d ransack his hard drive, open all his Word files and sift through the guts. Peel back the poetry, probe at the prose. Read the private things out loud to a room of cops. Probably laugh. Tears prick his eyes at the unfairness of it. So he’s miserable in high school. It didn’t make him a killer. Shouldn’t.

He works feverishly, sweat standing out on his brow, so intent on the task at hand, at purifying his books, that he doesn’t notice Archie come in.

“Jug?”

He looks up at him, dark hair hanging in his eyes from under the beanie. “Hey.”

“What are you doing?”

He looks down at the notebook in his hands, too shredded now to be useable. “I’m getting rid of everything.” His voice sounds weird to him, too raw. It hurts the way his eyes do after a night of crying. “-everything they can use to pin it on me.”

“You really think -?”

“Face it, Arch. They need a scapegoat, and I’m the perfect target.”

“But you’re not guilty. They can’t blame you if you’re not guilty.” Archie sits down on the rug, in the mound of paper snow. “They’ll find that out soon enough.”

And wasn’t that a nice thought. The town with pep! Justice served for the innocent.

“Jug.” Archie reaches out and touches his leg gently, forcing Jughead to meet his eyes. Archie’s eyes are very warm and very brown. Jughead looks at him and thinks, my god, he was raised by Fred Andrews. Of course he thinks adults know what they’re doing.

And then he remembers. And feels guilty.

He’s reached the first page in his algebra notebook, and deftly folds down the blue-ink BORED in the top right corner. He hates the Jughead who wrote it. Who was living in Twin Peaks and still had the nerve to find algebra boring. Tears it out.

Archie gets up from the floor and returns with another pair of scissors from his desk and one of his own spiral notebooks. He settles down in front of Jughead and starts taking the scissors to the page.

Jughead looks up again, mystified. “What are you cutting?”

A long rectangle of paper hits Archie’s lap. “Song lyrics.”

Jughead’s hand flashes out and catches him by the wrist. “Don’t cut them up.”

Archie keeps his head down, steadily working. “I have to. They’re about her.”

For a long while he sits with his hand still on Archie’s wrist, feeling the tendons move under his hand as Archie cuts. And cuts, and cuts. Then he draws it quietly back and picks up his own scissors again. The methodic sound of the snipping blades is the only noise in the room.

Archie pulls some of the pieces deftly toward himself as they come loose, as if he doesn’t want Jughead to see. But that’s okay. Jughead had flipped that page that said GAY a hundred times face-down.

He picks up another glossy black notebook from the stack and starts in. By the time it’s gone dark outside the window they’re both covered in paper. The scraps spread out around Archie’s bedposts like a curling fog. Like the lava in the game they used to play when they were kids. Don’t let your feet touch the ground. 

  
When they ask Fred if they can make a fire, he says yes. He doesn’t even ask what they’re burning.

 


	2. devil's knot (it feels how it looks)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the run on sentences are out of control. tw for homophobia and this being super dark in general.

Wednesday morning Archie leads them downstairs and asks Fred to take them to the school-supply store. They get six new notebooks each. Jughead’s never been there when it’s not September - he wants it to be either exactly the same or a ghost town, and of course it's neither. Laptop accessories have replaced the back-to-school displays, and they’ve rearranged the arts and crafts aisle. But otherwise, people come and go as they would anywhere, undisturbed, unaware that there’s a warrant out on his head (as they said in the old west), unaware that even under the fluorescents in the notebook aisle there’s a noose tightening under the collar of his hoodie. 

He pretends as hard as he can. Pretends it’s September and that they’ve turned back time, that none of it has happened yet. Pretends it’s earlier than that, pretends it’s June. Lets Fred foot the bill and pretends he’s Archie’s brother. He pretends with a fervour that he hasn’t felt since his mom left with Jellybean, a desperation that seeks to convince himself that maybe, just momentarily, he can be somewhere and someone else.

It works enough. It doesn’t  _ work _ but it works enough, and that’s all he can ask. 

Once in sixth grade, Kevin Keller had found him beaten to shit in the corner of their middle school’s locker room, lips gluey with blood, the solid imprint of a size-six sneaker standing out in dust on his t-shirt. Jughead was no stranger to the aggression of others, but this was his first time really getting pounded, and the feeling of that much blood draining out of his body was all new to his twelve-year-old senses. He’d lain there paralyzed on the tile, half with fear, half with embarrassment, and the quickest way out of the situation had seemed to be to die, which he had attempted to do by shutting his eyes ferociously tight against the floor and waiting for the inevitable moment his swollen lungs and bloody throat just collapsed. 

It was during that period of wait that Kevin found him, and Jughead had had to squint through the blood in his eyes to know where to direct the plea that Kevin not get anyone, that Kevin just leave him there or stay with him, it made no difference, but not get an adult or even Archie for him, please, but just let him be. And Kevin had held him and rocked him while Jughead tried to stem the flow of blood from his nose, and Kevin had whispered furious and broken things in his ear, things like _ “they’re just jealous of you, it’s not you, it’s them, they want to be you and they’re just jealous because they aren’t” _ and while he hadn’t believed them for a moment he had been over-aware that these must be the words Kevin repeats to himself every morning, after every locker incident they’ve had assemblies to discuss and every football practice that disintegrated into jeers and taunting and every night the teachers pulled someone into detention for spray-painting Kevin’s name on the wall or carving it with a compass needle into the yellow bathroom partitions. 

And yet it had been eerily comforting, that he wasn’t the only one who had to pretend. That he wasn’t the only one who fed himself lies like he was starving, who buried his terror at being alive in a stubborn dedication to what he only desperately hoped could be true. That other people, too, sometimes shut their eyes and ferociously pretended things were alright when they weren’t at all, and would probably never be. 

Neither of them had spoken of that day since. But Jughead had remembered it vividly a year later, when their choir teacher had set her foot down and said no, Kevin could absolutely  _ not _ play Gertrude in their middle school’s pared-down version of Hamlet, because there were too many girls who wanted the role and no parent wanted to see their daughter passed over for a nearly-leading role in favour of seeing Kevin strut around in a costume he had no business wearing. 

She’d stuck to her guns even though Kevin had known all the lines, and even when Reggie, whose asshole years were still ahead of him, had piped up that, well, in Shakespeare’s day, men would have played all the female parts anyways. Kevin had lifted his chin without a wobble, and if it had been only a year or two later, Jughead was sure he would have told Mrs. Kraminski to shove her copy of Hamlet where the sun didn’t shine. But as it was, he had stalked proudly offstage with his head high, and even Chuck, whose size-seven Adidas had once decorated Kevin’s chest with the same kind of print Jughead had worn on the locker room floor, didn’t hiss a snide comment as he passed. 

Kevin never came near the play again, despite being by far the best actor in the grade seven class. Betty had been a timid, trembling Gertrude in rehearsals, and Midge Klump had played Ophelia with all the sensitivity of a tire iron. Jughead sees the movie version much later, but in his mind Ophelia will always be Midge, spiky black hair newly-chopped, braces glinting in the broken spotlight, tossing flowers offstage in size-five combat boots. As fearless and as hard-headed as he’d always wanted to be.

He never told anyone about the things Kevin said on the locker room floor. He also never told anyone when Kevin winked at him a week after those disastrous auditions, when Jughead had caught him carrying the fabric of Gertrude’s dress down the hallway when everyone else was in assembly. They never found the costume. Betty went onstage in something Alice Cooper had whipped up that made her look - adorably -  like a creampuff. Mrs. Kraminski held a grudge against Kevin until she retired, but she never found a trace of that dress. 

Jughead had never figured out why Kevin had trusted him not to tell. It had never crossed his mind that Kevin hadn’t stolen the dress, or that anyone involved in the ultimately disastrous production had doubted that he had. But Kevin had simply believed himself out of the consequences. Jughead for the first time had felt a stab of envy for Kevin’s life, for Kevin’s ability to live so firmly and so successfully in his own make-believe world. And yet he knew always in the back of his mind what he had known spitting blood in the locker room, that Kevin’s life depended horribly on a fishing wire tightrope of fantasy and pain, and that Jughead really wanted no part of it.

If Jughead had wanted anything it was to be normal. But it was too late now, far far too late, and if he was honest with himself it had been too late ever since he’d started calling himself Jughead at the age of three-and-a-half, because the name staining his birth certificate had been so blithely wrong to his ears. And now in the school supply store, watching Archie debate between royal blue and navy blue composition books, it feels far too impossibly late for him to be anywhere but here, with a potential murder charge ticking like a time bomb above his head and a frightening conviction in his heart that even at fifteen there was nothing he could do to convince them of his innocence. 

Since they’re there, Fred asks if Jughead wants an external hard drive, maybe to backup the files on his laptop. Jughead says no. He wants the opposite of a hard drive. He wants less storage. He wants a brand new baby computer with nothing on it, nothing embarrassing, nothing incriminating, no folders hidden within folders where he used indecipherably labelled word documents to ponder exactly how similar he and Kevin Keller were and what precisely it was about Archie’s honey brown eyes that made him want to cry and laugh at the same time. He wants no evidence of his writing, he wants no memories of the summer, he wants to be anywhere but here and anyone - anyone at all - but himself. 

But it’s hard to say this to Fred in aisle two, so he just shakes his head and says he’s fine.

Archie’s cheerful on the ride home, six glossy brand new spiral-bound notebooks balanced in a stack on his knees. He’d gone with royal blue, in the end, but had balanced the blue notebooks among red and purple and forest green. Jughead’s are all yellow, a more cheerful colour than black, less damning, less suspicious. A tear hits the front cover of one as they coast over a hill. 

Fred has a kind of magnetic sixth sense for tears and turns around in the front seat, but Jughead squashes his wet cheek against the window and gives a winning performance of sleepy boredom until Fred looks back at the road. Archie’s talking about what he wants for lunch. 

You make believe or you die. He’d always understood that about life, the necessity of lying to yourself when times got hard and the truth got too unpleasant to live with. But he doesn’t understand why it doesn’t get easier. Why he can’t convince himself he belongs here, or ease the weight pressing and pressing on his chest like years worth of size-six adidas sneakers. 

If he ever found peace during the mornings he slept on the floor of the janitor’s closet, it was the tiny nucleus of time between his consciousness settling in from sleep and the awareness of the hard wooden floor pressed against his spine, where he could keep his eyes shut and it was easy to pretend he was sleeping anywhere in the world. Maybe he was at home, in his childhood bed, or on the floor of Archie’s den, during a sleepover. With his eyes shut it didn’t matter. And if he was really good, he could keep it going for minutes at a time, could pretend in the blackness that there was a bed under him, a breakfast waiting downstairs, a home. 

He savoured one of these every night as well, in the space between closing his eyes and blacking out completely, letting the closet tilt and change in his mind’s eye as he stares at the inside of his eyelids. He could picture so perfectly how the room would look if he were in Archie’s bed right now, know exactly how the Dog Day Afternoon poster Archie had paid two bucks for when the Blockbuster closed would swim into focus just on his right if he opened his eyes. Sometimes he’d got so caught up in it he’d be surprised when he blinked and the stupid poster wasn’t there. 

Jelly used to beg him to play with her whenever they got home from a movie. “Let’s be them,” she’d urge, her catchphrase in those days, and they’d take on whatever characters they’d seen at the drive-in and chase each other around the basement. Somehow, whatever the plot, it always culminated in some kind of tickle fight. He never minded. It was Jelly more than anyone who’d taught him to play pretend. The kid had a dress-up closet that would bring Hollywood costume designers to their knees. 

He wonders how much of it fit in his mom’s car. Hates himself for not rescuing more of it for her. 

He doesn’t have lunch with Fred or Archie. He carries the weight of Fred’s concerned gaze all the way up the stairs on his back, collapses under the Dog Day Afternoon poster, and pretends he’s still in that janitor’s closet.

Maybe that was all he deserved.

 


	3. numb blues (villagers, torches)

Maybe the problem is that they never seem to have good days at the same time. On Monday Archie’s therapist tells him about the term hypersexual. He comes home relaxed, secure, humming a song he hasn’t written all the words for yet. He bursts in the back door to ask Jughead if he wants to go out to the movies and finds his dad holding Jughead on the couch as he cries his heart out into Fred’s chest.  

Fred takes them out for fast food that night, but the treat tastes so much like pity food that Archie slides back into the funk he’s been brooding in for days. Jughead picks at his meal and Fred seems to age ten years watching him. Archie eats both their burgers and feels guilty about it. 

And then other days Jughead is bouncing off the walls and Archie can hardly get out of bed, Jughead and Fred will banter back and forth over the breakfast table like old times and Archie can only sit, a lead weight pinning him down to the chair like he’s a balloon in danger of drifting off. 

Maybe its because they like different weather, because Archie likes sun and Jughead’s happiest in drizzle and gloom. Or maybe it’s the related but paradoxical issue that Archie is always too hot and Jughead always too cold so that whether the windows are open or shut in their room one of them is unhappy. They bicker for the first time since the summer, and their fights always leave a sour taste in Archie’s mouth. They make up almost immediately every time, mostly because they share a room and have no one but each other, but it still hurts. It feels like they’re slipping backward in time, that they’re back in July when they hardly spoke because Geraldine-

Because Jennifer - 

Because -

Some days he can think about it. It’s hard work, like solving a complex and arduous math problem, but he can examine the facts of it with Jughead’s objectivity, feeling always like he’s shifting pieces in some massive puzzle that one day is going to be clear to him. Other days it’s just a mess, and everything he’s ever thought or felt or learned about it is like someone vomiting paint on a canvas, an indecipherable, senseless blur in his head. 

His dad starts fighting with insurance companies on the phone, trying to get Jughead covered under their family plan so that he can get therapy too. Fred is subsisting on coffee and the house always smells like it, because there’s always a pot on, or just brewed, or going stale waiting for him to come home from work. Archie has had the disturbing but persistent thought that if it wasn’t for the coffee smell, their house would probably smell like a hospital, or a morgue. Part of this is frustration that Jughead won’t let him sleep with the windows open. Archie’s promised his dad he won’t go on nighttime runs past 8pm anymore, only the hours between ten and one are when he has the most frustrated energy to burn off, and most needs to feel any kind of fresh air on his skin. But the frightened, uncertain look Fred gets in his eyes whenever Archie goes anywhere alone is enough to keep him from asking. 

He wasn’t stupid. He knew his dad saw Jason every time he looked at him. He’d known the whole week they were painstakingly dragging the river for the body, and he knew now that Jason was in the ground. He’d known when Fred had come up to him in the living room the morning the body was found and wrapped him too tightly in a hug. 

“I’m not going anywhere, dad” Archie had said, and Fred had tensed, voice breaking with the parental dread that accompanies any display of their child’s wisdom beyond their years. 

“I know.” 

And Archie had let him hold onto him, sadly and abruptly aware that he was all that his dad had. 

FP shows up Friday, drunk, wanting to see Jughead. Archie wakes up to the tail end of the argument they’re having at the front door, Fred’s voice low but deadly serious, FP loud and belligerent enough that Archie knows if he checked out the window there would be a light on at the Coopers’. With a nervous glance at Jughead asleep on the floor, Archie creeps to the top of the staircase, where Fred is blocking FP from entering the house. 

Fred hisses: “You are not waking him up in the middle of the night.” 

“You’re going to keep me from seeing my kid?” 

“I would never. But you’re not getting him out of bed just to break his heart. He’s got school in the morning.” 

“He can handle it!” 

“He’s tired.” 

“So let him find out how the world works.” 

Fred explodes. “He’s fifteen years old, he shouldn’t have to know how the world works!” 

“Why the hell not? I knew how the world worked at fifteen-” 

“You didn’t know  _ shit _ , neither of us did.” Archie presses his cheek against the railing. “Go home, FP.” 

“Let me talk to my kid and I will.” 

“Come back tomorrow.” 

“Fred-” 

A dog howls somewhere outside, and Fred glances up at the stairs. Archie shrinks back against the railing, counting on the darkness to camouflage him. Fred doesn’t seem to notice him, but his eyes stay too long on a patch of dark a few feet to the right of Archie’s shoulder before he turns back to FP, saying something that’s muffled by Archie’s heart beating in his ears. 

The front door slams behind Fred as the two men move out to the porch. If he strains in the dark, he can just see the top of his dad’s head through the window in the door. But he hears nothing more through the wood, and when Vegas comes plodding into the hall from Fred’s room to join him, collar jingling, Archie gives up his post. 

Jughead’s still asleep when he comes back in the room, one arm tucked awkwardly under him where he lies on his side, his breathing even. Archie fights the urge to lay down next to him: the movement of the mattress might jostle his friend awake. Instead he tiptoes to his bed and collapses on his front. 

He feigns sleep when he hears his dad crack their door open. 

“Archie?”

“Yeah?” 

“Jughead asleep?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Okay. Go to bed.”  

The door shuts, and the room is a cave again, pitch black except for the streetlamps outside. The coffee smell doesn’t reach here, there’s a lingering odor of sweat from his endless rounds with the punching bag, only it turns his stomach rather than offering any kind of familiarity. Under that, it smells oddly musty and impersonal, as if this is a stranger’s spare room and he’s only here for a visit. Jughead’s house has a particular smell, and a week ago he’d been able to smell it on Jughead’s clothes, but it’s gone now and he’s increasingly convinced that if it weren’t for the coffee, they’d all smell like corpses. 

In the moonlight from the shut window, he watches Jughead carefully. Jughead had become obsessed recently with bringing home belongings from his locker that he thought might incriminate him in a search, and the library books and video games are piled neatly around his head like a castle wall. Archie can’t see his face from this angle, but he can see the rise and fall of his skinny chest, and it’s both soothing and worrying. Sometimes watching Jughead breathe helps him sleep. Other times he feels like if he closes his eyes, Jughead will stop. 

When he comes downstairs the next morning, Jughead’s at the coffeemaker, Fred at the island. Vegas is eating noisily from a dog bowl on the floor. 

“Hey, Jughead, come here.” Fred’s poring over a crossword puzzle, brow furrowed in concentration. “I’m useless with these. Look at number ten, down.” 

Jughead bends over the counter with him. “Try impasse.” 

Fred counts the spaces neatly with his pencil before filling it in, nodding the whole while. He reaches out to ruffle Jughead’s hair. “You’re one smart cookie, Jughead.” 

That’s all he says to him. No mention of FP. No significant shared glance with Archie as Jughead ducks his head toward his oatmeal. Archie begins, not for the first time, to wonder if everything he’s experiencing in the last few days is a very lucid dream. The circles under Fred’s eyes are dark as bruises, which would gesture neatly to a night spent whisper-yelling at FP on the porch if any of them had been sleeping longer than a few hours a night anyways. But Fred always looks like that lately, and there’s not enough clues to make a solid guess. 

Jughead’s the detective, anyway. Jughead’s the one who sleeps with true crime novels piled all around his head. Jughead glows with Fred’s praise all the way to school and Archie is abruptly, briefly, but nastily jealous. 

But then the next day he has his therapy appointment, and Jughead lets him open a window, and everything settles itself again. 

For now.

 

FP doesn’t come back, but Sheriff Keller’s been by a handful of times, Fred blocking his entrance to the house, demanding he get a warrant in a tone that suggests Keller will have to bring a warrant and a shotgun if he wants to gain an inch. Archie, who’s never known Kevin’s dad and his to be anything but civil to each other, watches these exchanges with a morbid kind of fascination. 

“Fred, I just want to ask him some questions-” 

“You had your chance to ask him some questions, he answered them. Now I want you to get off my property.” 

“If you can just give me fifteen minutes-” 

“I’m not giving you fifteen minutes, I’m not even giving you five minutes. I don’t know why you’re still investigating this, he has an alibi-” 

“And it’s pretty convenient that you’re his alibi.” 

Jughead’s fingers are cold on Archie’s forearm, his grip shaky. Archie’s good day, Jughead’s bad one. Fred shifts his weight in the doorframe, blocking Jughead entirely from Sheriff Keller’s view. “I provided you with documentation-”

“Which could easily have been falsified.” 

“Ask my guys then. Ask any one of them. I’ll give you their numbers. They’ll tell you the same thing. Jughead was working for me the week of the eleventh. If you don’t believe me, Sherrif, you can take me in, waste the district’s time, hook me up to a polygraph, I’m more than willing. But leave my kids alone.” 

Fred’s so convincing that even Archie, who knows he’s bluffing, believes him. Keller starts speaking, but Fred swings the door shut and locks it. Then he yanks down the front blinds. 

“Dad-” 

But Fred turns to snap at him, the excess heat from the confrontation still boiling in his eyes. “Archie, next time, you two just go upstairs, okay?” 

Jughead starts crying and runs out of the room. Archie gives his dad a withering look and follows him.

“It’s a witch hunt,” says Jughead later, the two of them squeezed into the tiny downstairs powder room, the sink poking into Archie’s spine, Jughead on the closed lid of the toilet with his knees drawn up. “And I’m the witch.” 

“No, you’re not,” says Archie, but he feels unsettled anyway. Jughead turns his head away and stares at the wall, eyes red and bloodshot. Archie waits and waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. 

 

They’re having pizza when Fred pulls Archie into the family room. 

“Hey.” He looks nervous, old, t-shirt hanging loosely on him. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I just don’t want Jughead to have to hear-” 

“I know.” 

Fred reaches out and touches Archie’s shoulder, and the touch seems to strengthen the both of them somehow, as if their joined lifeblood is all they need to stay upright. His face looks younger again, healthier, reassuring as ever. 

Coffee. Burnt toast. More coffee. 

“You lied to him,” says Archie, still impressed. “I don’t even know what a polygraph is.” 

“Yeah.” Fred runs a hand through Archie’s hair with a wry smile. “That’s why your mom could never beat me at card brag.” 

Pizza. Dipping sauce. More coffee. That hand in his hair. 

He can’t help but wonder if his dad tells any other lies. 


	4. paradise lost (nightmares, woods)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i'm really just cleaning up dumping the last of my drafts i wrote post episode 7

> _That the woods existed at all was an acknowledgement, not of the need for parks or of places for children to play, but of the need for flood control.  
> _ _\- Mara Leveritt, Devil's Knot: The True Story of the West Memphis Three_
> 
> _Oh, I know we've come a long way,_   
>  _We're changing day to day,_   
>  _But tell me, where do the children play?_
> 
> _\- Cat Stevens_

**tuesday, 11:46 pm**  


It’s pitch black in Fred’s bedroom - the one that used to be Fred-and-Mary’s. Archie’s been sleeping in his dad’s bed more often than not lately, the way he used to when he was a kid with nightmares.

It usually happens around midnight. Archie leaves the room and climbs into bed with Fred, leaving Jughead alone on the mattress on the floor. Once it became a regular thing, Fred and Archie both made it clear that Jughead was free to do the same, but he can’t bring himself to breach the contract, the years-old hide and seek rule that Fred and Mary’s room was off-limits. Nightmare, thunderstorm, come what may - Fred’s room wasn’t for him. He remains, at best, a favourite guest in the Andrews home, whatever Fred did to treat him like a son.

But tonight he has to, and he pushes the door open with an odd sense of fright coating his lungs: worse than any of the nightmares have been. He enters quickly, without letting his eyes adjust to the dark, because even that seems intrusive. It’s a bit the same feeling of sneaking into a movie theatre, but too intimate for his taste.

“Arch?” Fred’s a light sleeper. In the non-light from the window, Jughead can just make out his figure, sitting up in the blankets.

“Archie’s throwing up.”

Fred is out of bed like a shot, faster than Jughead’s ever seen anyone move. By the time he gets to the hallway outside the bathroom Fred is already crouched beside Archie, one hand on his back, murmuring low, comforting things that Jughead can’t make out. They look so much like father and son, something about the matching slope of their backs, that he feels painfully that he’s intruding just by being there.

He goes back to his mattress. The room is cold without Archie in it.

The next morning he finds them sleeping on the couch together, Archie looking impossibly young, Fred impossibly old. Again, he feels that uneasy sense of intrusion, the uncomfortable out-of-placeness that has characterized his life so far. He gets it at school a lot: a feeling like he’s a ghost, or a shadow, and that the inner workings of this town could go clicking along like clockwork without him in it.

He thinks about making breakfast for everyone, but he isn’t very hungry.

And Archie’s sick, and Fred hasn’t been eating much anyway.

 

**monday, 3:14pm**

He sees the room for the first time in daylight about a week later, when Archie’s football and Fred’s work had left him alone in the house. Jughead, at this point, was a professional time-killer. He’d spent his time since leaving home employing increasingly creative ways to whittle away the hours between school, dinner, and sleep - the only certain parts of his day. To do so in a house fully stocked with food and entertainment was an unbelievable luxury. Some afternoons he worked on his novel, others he’d spend practicing Archie’s video games in hopes of beating him that evening, on other occasions still he’d peruse the bookshelves in the Andrews house and treat himself to an hour curled up in the den with their offerings. The spines of the books crack like a bullet when he opens them, because Fred and Archie had at least as many knick-knacks and photo frames on the shelves as they did novels, and both were more apt to reach for the ragged Star Wars DVD set that lived eternally on top of the TV than any written entertainment.

Mostly, however, he did what he had done at sleepovers in that house when he was young and only wandered. Alone in the house, he’d trace his fingers in zig-zag patterns over the wall of the basement or the tidy countertop of the kitchen, skimming appliances, stacks of bills, homeless TV remotes. He’s examined every picture on the walls, fridge, and side-tables ad nauseum. He’s memorized the notes on the fridge.

He’s more or less grown up in this home, and yet it still feels like a museum when he walks through it: a perfect artist’s diorama of someone else’s warm, safe, American life. He knows better than than by now - knows there’s cracks, fissures, damage that can’t be repaired, pain as thick and messy as oil. But it’s nothing, _nothing_ compared to the trailer park (the hole behind the picture frame, the row of bottles beside the couch). And it makes him feel safe.

He’s been everywhere, and seen everything - (to mutilate a phrase from Fred’s unopened copy of _Lolita_ ) save for the master bedroom. That unspoken childhood forbiddenness of it had kept him out, along with the guilt that came at even the consideration of breaching the privacy of the man who was the only reason he was no longer sleeping outdoors. And yet it called to him constantly: something alluring about the eternally half-opened door, the plainness of the sliver of wall that shows through, the uncharted territory of something in the Andrews household he had never seen or touched.

Fred had no secrets. (A sentence he might have typed confidently in his novel in another life, before Jason, before everything. What was once an unquestionable fact was now, at best, a contested opinion.) But at the very least, Fred presents himself as one who has nothing to hide from his son and momentary surrogate, and Jughead, despite his habit of leaving no stone unturned, has no reason to question his innocence. Deep down, there’s nothing he wants to think of less.

He’s not standing in front in Fred’s bedroom door at 3pm on a schoolday because he wants evidence, anyways. He wants something he can’t explain to himself, something a bit like family and something a bit like comfort and something a bit like a satisfaction for the never-ending curiosity in his chest, and yet none of these things fit the bill. He just wants to look. He wants it with an all-over want that he feels in his fingers and all the way down to his toes, the way other people want sex, maybe.

He doesn’t know what he’d expected but he finds it: a tidy, butter-coloured room with a bed too large for one occupant and not a whole lot of possessions in it. The bureau has a hairbrush and two framed photos; the side-table a single alarm clock and a Stephen King paperback that’s too dusty to have been touched recently. The only window’s curtains - the same off-yellow as the walls- are tied back to let the light in, although the window itself stays shut. There’s a small walk-in closet with a shut door. A pair of shoes - size eleven - sits next to the bed.

The walls are mostly bare. Fred and Mary’s marriage certificate is still framed across from the headboard, and he peeks at the unfamiliar date with a secret thrill. Her maiden name had been Moore. Andrews is nicer, he thinks, but he might be biased.

The only other wall decor is a few framed album covers, spaced neatly on the wall with the window. Two of them are Bruce Springsteen, which comes as no surprise, but he gets a kick out of it anyway. He has Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf hanging up, which makes Jughead laugh.

It’s rare to see something in this house that’s Fred’s and Fred’s alone. Music is one area where Jughead and Fred are closer than Archie and Fred. He has no doubt Fred played Archie _Born to Run_ a hundred times in the womb only for Archie to come out thinking the history of music began and ended with Ed Sheeran.

One of the pictures on the dresser is Fred and Archie, a child-sized Archie, riding Fred’s shoulders, the sun on his hair making it look like he’s caught fire. The other is older still - Mary in a slim pink dress, and Fred with an arm around her and a lot more hair. They can’t be more than twenty-two, twenty-three. And they can’t be more in love.

He holds it to his chest for a long moment and doesn’t know why.

Then he puts it down and gets the hell out of there.

 

**friday, 2:19am**

He wakes up as frightened and confused as if he’d had a nightmare, but there’s no memory of it, only disorientation and panic as he flails out with an arm and knocks a stack of library books down onto his face. He pushes them blindly off and sits up on the mattress, the world for one long moment an endless cacophony of crinkling dust jackets and the dead-sounding thumps of his books spilling across the floor.

In a bare patch of moonlight he can read the cover of the nearest one: TRUE CRIME IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by an A. Arthur Cummings. For some reason that makes his heart pound harder, and he stares at the book as if it’s a rat, or a ghost, as terrified of the thing as if it were alive.

His knuckles strike the side of Archie’s bed as he reaches out in a flash, and he draws his hand back, pain exploding across the surface of his skin. He feels, absurdly, like the book had bit him.

He feels sick. He feels really sick. Maybe whatever Archie had had was catching.

He hadn’t told anyone the real reason he’d brought everything home from his locker. Not even Betty, because she wouldn’t understand, because she had nothing more to hide than a paper with a B+ instead of an A on it. Fred and Archie had both frowned confusedly - that look of total cluelessness was hereditary, it seemed - but let him do it without fuss.

Jughead knows about coerced confessions - this wasn’t his first rodeo with the works of A. Arthur Cummings, after all - and keeps waking up thinking he’s given one. At least half of the football team thought he had killed Jason as part of some kind of perverted blood-brother ritual. At least half of the faculty thought he had killed Jason because they were all waiting for the day he reached into his locker and brought out a gun. Alice Cooper probably had the story all typed and ready to go. If he keeps going on like this, she’s going to have to use it.

He used to be able to push thoughts like this down, but they don’t go away so easy anymore.

He goes to the window and opens it, the way Archie likes it at night, and looks out at the street. Quiet, starless suburbia. From up here he can see almost everything: a silent car passing down the road, a stray cat licking it’s paws on a fence. The cool night air hits his face and he breathes deeply in. He spent all day being afraid of going to jail, but sometimes he thinks the Andrews house isn’t so different, lately. Like a quarantine house in an old movie.

For one bizarre, horrible second, he thinks about jumping. Not jumping exactly, but falling. Just opening his arms and letting gravity take him, so that neither Archie nor Fred nor Sheriff Keller would have to worry about him anymore. Only that would be a signed confession, and the real killer would never be found, and he doesn’t mean it, anyway, because he’s as afraid of dying as he is of going to jail.

In his one and only session with a school guidance counselor, one it had taken him a month and a half just to work up the courage to book and then signed with his full name because it was as good a pseudonym as any - he’d confessed that he thought about things sometimes without meaning them. Things like how he could easily set fire to the projection booth at the twilight, or pitch his expensive mp3 player out the window of a moving car to shatter it, or hurt himself, or hurt other people. And he never meant to do any of them, but they crossed his mind all the time anyway, and he just wanted to know if that meant there was something loose upstairs, if it meant he was dangerous, if he was going to end up wherever Jeff Dahmer was. Is there a difference, he’d asked anxiously, between being suicidal and thinking about suicide for no good reason but never wanting to carry it out.

Riverdale High’s guidance system was pretty shit, but Mr. Jenkins had actually helped that time. He’d said lots of people had impulses like that, and the fact that Jughead was able to recognize them as questionable meant he was a-okay. Then he’d told Jughead to come back in a week or two for a follow up, but he never had. And he’d assigned him homework that Jughead hadn’t done - something about writing out the thoughts and answering them as if a friend of his had said them.

“I feel like falling out this window,” he whispers to himself, but doesn’t really mean it. He can’t imagine any of his friends saying that, so he gives up the game.

There’s music playing, softly. He holds his breath and listens, thinking it might be outside the window, that it might be Betty’s house - the music’s her style, sweet and slow and sad. But then he realizes it’s coming from downstairs, up through the heating grates. He wraps his arms around himself and watches the neighbourhood for awhile longer. There’s a gluey, dry feeling in his mouth that the cool air isn’t helping, and it only gets worse when he notices how many lights are on in the neighbourhood. Maybe no one’s sleeping tonight.

A tear runs down his cheek and surprises him. He wipes it off hurriedly with the back of his hand. Maybe he could sit in the hall and work on his novel. Then the light from his laptop wouldn’t keep Archie up. And then he could put all this nervous energy where it counted, where it would actually help. Only his charger was downstairs, he remembers. And his battery was low.

He descends the stairs as softly as he can, remembering to step over the one that creaks. His stomach is starting to feel weird, and he really wants water. Even if Fred’s up, he can probably slip into the kitchen unseen, and fill a glass.

His charger is in his backpack by the front door. He sneaks it out and clutches it in his hand. It would be easy to head back upstairs, now, without bugging anyone, but there’s nothing to drink out of in the upstairs bathroom, and he really needs that water.

The TV is playing some infomercial with the sound off. Fred’s stereo is what’s making the noise, - the one that did cassettes, CDs, radio, and had a record player on top - the display reading 2:21 in green.

And for a moment Jughead sees not Fred, but a hollow, empty version of him: bloodless, gaunt, and stiff - like a bad wax-museum caricature of himself, a person held together by too-tight piano wire and collapsing paper-mache. He looks like the past month has taken the very last few years of his life, without mercy. In the harsh TV light he reminds Jughead of the last room in the wax museum at the town carnival when he and Archie were ten - the one that had given them nightmares for weeks because that wax attraction was creepy as all hell and belonged more in Stephen King’s Maine than in the town with pep(!). Only this is worse.

And then Fred looks at him and the illusion breaks and his face is as warm and as mild as ever, though the hair stays thin and the lines purple under his eyes. Fred looks at him for awhile, and then shakes his head slightly and says, as if as explanation:

“You look like your dad sometimes.”

His dad would get it, Jughead realizes. The thing about falling.

“I, uh- I was just getting a drink of water.”

“My house is your house.” Fred nods to the kitchen. “Knock yourself out.”

He goes, and he fills a glass with shaking hands, his back to the doorway, terrified momentarily of looking back and seeing Fred all zombie-like again, all empty and hopeless and dead-looking, but when he looks there’s nothing to see and Fred is just sitting there with tears in his eyes, looking at silent pictures of some kind of weight-loss supplement and thinking, no doubt, that there was nothing more he could do to keep Archie safe and that it wasn’t enough, would never be. And it makes Jughead miss his own dad so much that he can’t stand it, so much that he drops the glass back into the sink with enough force to crack it, and stands there with his finger leaking blood from the cut glass as Gilbert O’Sullivan sings _alone again, alone, alone, alone, alone again naturally, naturally_ , and he feels so unreal and so cold.

He walks back into the den without water. He’s left his laptop charger by the sink, but he doesn’t want to write anymore tonight, anyways. Jughead swallows and lowers himself quietly onto the sofa, pressing the cut finger invisibly against the inside of his thigh so that it won’t bleed. He sits beside Fred, stiff as a wax person himself except for the trembling, and then relaxes enough so that their shoulders touch, and then the first sob pours out of his mouth before he can take it back.

“Jughead-” whispers Fred and only holds him, lets Jughead bury himself into his shoulder and shake with the tears.

 

**monday 2:41am**

After that he thought he’d be done with wandering the house at night, but he does it more now, like an addiction he can’t shake. There’s a sense of pervading wrongness about his doing it, but it’s too late to give it up.

The light from the master bath is on and spills out the open door, and Jughead goes to it like a moth, finds Fred bent over the porcelain sink, heaving.

In the mirror he sees Fred see him and sees the switch happen, the part where Fred realizes he’s not alone and pretends to be all right, only the mask only half-sticks tonight and makes his face look oddly melted.

“Are you sick?” Jughead asks, feeling as small as his voice, the lateness of the hour giving everything a quality of unreality. The window is open, but there are no sounds from out on the street. The air is so dead and dry that the question is like a pistol-crack, and he feels even more out of place here, a stranger in the Andrews home, a ghost wandering the halls.

“Think so.” The lie is deliberate, perfect, premeditated. “Ate something that didn’t agree with me.”

They stand there looking at each other too long, then. The dark places under Fred’s eyes are longer and deeper than he’s ever seen them. He feels unsettled and lonely, both of these things a chasm somewhere under his ribs.

“Go back to bed, Jug.” The parental authority doesn’t leave his voice.

He doesn’t, and Fred turns back to the mirror, looks at his reflection. Rinses out the sink.

“Sometimes I dream about -” He stops himself there, but it doesn’t matter. Jughead knows what he dreams about. He dreams about pulling Archie out of the river.

“Go back to bed.” Fred says again, in a tone that brooks no argument, and Jughead does.

 

**wednesday 4:01pm**

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asks Fred.

Jughead shrugs. “It costs too much.”

He hadn’t meant to upset him, but Fred looks upset anyway. He comes around the kitchen counter and stands in front of Jughead, hovers there like an actor who forgot his blocking for the scene and is just trying to take up space. “Jughead,” His voice is soft and full of love. “I want you to promise me you’re not going to worry about that, okay?”

He feels so ashamed all of a sudden that he tears his gaze away, looks down at the floor. Doesn’t look up.

“Jug.” Fred reaches over and squeezes one of his hands too tight, voice insistent. It’s very unlike him. He feels like Fred might start shaking him, not enough to hurt, but enough to rattle. In another life they have this conversation sensibly, a hallmark of good parenting, but in this one the air choking them both is that of a breathless, cupboard-rattling argument. Jughead keeps his head down, tears swimming in his eyes, playing his mother when his father started yelling. “K.”

Fred doesn’t seem to feel the shift in the air. “Jughead, I want a promise.”

“I promise.” It comes out spiteful, more spit than honey. It vomits out of him. But if Fred minds, he doesn’t say.

“Good boy.” says Fred softly, sounding lost, and touches his hair once, the way FP used to.

 

**thursday 12:49am**

He has the dream again, the one he doesn’t remember when he wakes up. TRUE CRIME IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is still on the floor, and he steps on it when he gets off the mattress. He skids and has to grab the dresser to keep from wiping out.

He goes to Fred’s room.

Fred winces when Jughead touches him: a sharp flinch that they both try to pretend hasn’t happened. It’s the wince of someone whose muscles are raw from shaking, maybe whose stomach muscles hurt from dry heaving into his bathroom sink, whose neck muscles hurt from sleeping sitting up at work.

“Sorry,” Jughead whispers.

“Don’t worry.”

He lays there for a long time, hearing nothing outside the window. Fred’s breathing is so soft he thinks he’s gone back to sleep. He thinks for a long while about his own dad, somewhere out in the night. Is FP sleeping? Is FP thinking of him? Does FP remember?

He rolls over and presses his face into the pillow, the pillow that smells like nothing, because Mary doesn’t live there anymore.

“Fred?”

He’s not asleep. “Yeah, kiddo?”

For some reason he can’t stop thinking about Archie. “Do adults still have best friends?”

“Sometimes.” God bless Fred Andrews, fully coherent at midnight and ready to have this conversation. “A lot of adults can have a best friend. But not always.”

“Do you have a best friend?”

“I think Archie’s my best friend.”

Jughead had wanted to hear about FP. “Is your kid always your best friend?”

“Not always. But if you’re lucky, when your kid grows up, it happens.”

“Archie’s my best friend too.”

He feels Fred’s heart go out to him in that moment, feels him soften. “That’s good.”

“Do you have any grown up best friends?”

“I could name some people I like most. But it’s not the same as a best friend.”

“Was my dad your best friend?”

“Yeah, for a long time.”

For a long time, and then nothing. Like him and Archie, last summer: everything and then all of it gone.

“When you stopped talking to my dad, did you stop having a best friend?”

“Yeah.”

“How old were you?”

“We were in our thirties.”

“So you had a best friend until you were thirty.”

“I guess so.”

“And then you didn’t have another one?”

“Well, Archie’s mom was my best friend.”

Jughead draws back from him then, his voice thin. “Isn’t that different?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean, yes and no?”

“It means that she was more than a best friend, but that was the ground base.”

“Do you have to be best friends before you marry someone?” He knows he’s firing questions, but Fred keeps up.

“No. But it helps.”

Jughead doesn’t like that answer. “People say you have to marry your best friend.”

“They mean that the person you marry should be a best friend. But it doesn’t have to be the one person you call your best friend.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s like you and Archie and Betty.” Fred offers, still whispering. “If someone asked about your best friend, you’d say Archie. But you would call Betty your best friend, too. She’s just not your best, _best_ friend like Archie is. When I was growing up, Mary and your dad were both my best friends. But Mary was like Betty.”

Jughead pretends to accept this. “Oh.” He rolls over onto his back, eyes glinting up at the ceiling in the dark.

Then he blurts out. “I don’t want to marry Betty.”

“That’s okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

It’s ridiculous, but he relaxes at that, as reassured as if a spell has been broken. He draws his arms up to fold over his chest, but keeps his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling.

And then he asks the question.

“Did you ever think you were going to marry my dad?”

He knows the answer to this one, because FP talks a lot about Fred Andrews when drunk, and the room is so still that Fred doesn’t even consider lying. “There was a time when I wondered about it.”

“Why didn’t he marry you?”

“Your grandparents didn’t like that idea very much.”

Jughead rolls over until he’s buried into Fred’s chest, an apology already stumbling out his lips the moment his face tucks into the duvet. “ _Sorry_.” His voice is muffled, the adolescent curve of his back tiny as Fred instinctively wraps his arms around him. “I know I’m too old-”

“You’re not.” Jughead is shaking in his arms, and Fred pulls the covers higher over them both. “You’re never too old to hang onto someone when you’re scared.”

One last question, one he has to ask, even though he already knows. Knows because Fred throws up all the time and watches useless weight loss infomercials in the middle of the night even though Jughead can already feel his ribs through his back. Because FP used to wake up yelling and make Jellybean cry. “Do adults still have bad dreams?”

“Yeah.” says Fred. 

“Then what’s the point.”

Fred doesn't answer. 


	5. west of memphis, redux

> **a/n:** _jughead sleeping in the projection booth with the door cracked and the knife beside his head belongs to[ohmygodwhy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/pseuds/ohmygodwhy) (and [this ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11885049)crackerjack of a fanfic specifically) i'm just borrowing it _

“The things I said to Archie, that night,” says Fred. “The things you heard.”  
  
_In the stairwell._

The stairwell was only four months ago - _that night_ (emphasis Fred’s) was only four months ago. It seems at once to Jughead that everything since then has progressed with the speed of those baseball-and-wildlife flipbooks that he and Archie used to blow their allowance on. Flip through the pages quick enough and you could see the cheetah catch it’s prey, see the home run leave the park. Flip them backward and it happens in reverse: he sees these images now in a great rush of falling away - himself hurtling back out of the prison where he visits his father every Sunday, back out of Southside High where he now has friends, back past the white-and-grey hospital Christmas he’d spent at Fred’s bedside with Archie’s hand in his. Out of his foster family’s Southside home and back to the trailer, the treehouse, the closet, the drive-in. Back to when he dutifully charged his laptop every night under the booths at Pop’s to take down the daily atrocities of the Jason Blossom case.

He doesn’t write that story anymore, hasn’t figured out quite how to tie it up, but knows it’ll come to him one day. He thinks there’s another novel rattling around inside him, and one day he’ll put it down. But for the time being he is living with his foster family on the Southside, just a ten minute walk from the school, and there is no janitor's closet under the stairs, and if there were, he wouldn’t give it a second glance. In the great novel of his life there is an enormous expanse of pages between today and the night he slept in the garage.

Fred has been shot, survived, is recovering. Jughead has joined a gang, left, joined it again. It has been a young lifetime since he sat with Archie in his top-floor bedroom and cut notebook paper into snow. By that logic it could have been another lifetime since he had slept on the hard floor of the projection booth, the door cracked slightly against the heat, his father’s pocket knife resting beside his head just in case. Yet of everything he should have left in the past behind him he feels those hot, homeless, frightened days most of all, snapping at his heels like dogs whenever he counts change for milk at lunch, whenever his foster family supplies him with more than he can fit into a single, ratty backpack.

_I was sitting in the stairwell and Archie and Fred were fighting._

He doesn’t need the final detail, but Fred supplies it anyway, maybe mistaking his silence for misunderstanding.  
  
“The night you slept in the garage,” says Fred.

It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago and so many pages have been flipped that it seems inconsequential now, though at once it had hurt him more than anything had ever hurt before.  
  
“You don't have to-”  
  
“No, Jug, I do.” Fred’s eyes catch Jughead's and trap them, holding his gaze. “Will you sit down with me?”

Jughead will. Of course. Fred’s voice has a parental authority that cannot be ignored, even lonely, even weak. Fred sits with him on the couch where Jughead had once cried into his shirt in the middle of the night listening to Gilbert O’Sullivan sing _Alone Again, Naturally_ . Where Jughead and Archie had once play-wrestled and Archie had flipped Jughead off so that he’d banged his eye on the corner of the coffee table and it had turned black.  
  
“Jughead,” begins Fred, looking as old and as thin and as sad as he had that night, the night of the stairwell. “I said those things, and I am so sorry for them. I didn't mean them. I was - I was putting Archie first.”  
  
“We all were.”  
  
Jughead thinks he feels a moment of understanding pass between them, but then Fred reaches out and grabs his hands insistently, the _no_ he hasn't spoken loud and clear through the press.  
  
“I was sick, Jughead. And I was so afraid. I couldn't - I couldn't slip up for a moment. Because I was so sure I could lose him. So I told him what you heard me tell him. To stay away from you.”

Fred’s hands are very warm, even as they’re frail. Jughead tries to imagine this. Tries to see how near Archie's death must have seemed to him, a small white coffin at the end of a dark road.  
  
“Jughead, I didn't follow you out into that garage because I thought if I left him alone in the house I'd come back and he wouldn't be there anymore.”

Jughead understands this. Understands because Fred’s voice had shaken just a little, the way FP’s did on the other side of that jail cell. Understands because he’s felt that way about Jellybean before. The sister that has vanished for him into thin air.  
  
Fred squeezes his hands.  
  
“It's okay, Fred.”  
  
Fred's lip trembles as if Jughead's given him permission to cry and he's about to oblige. Then he shuts his eyes and breathes steadily in, and the mask is back in place, the solid fatherly reassurance that clings to his essence like a skin. When he opens his eyes again he seems warmer, somehow. Healthier. Less fragile. When he speaks it is with the quiet reassurance of experienced parenthood.  
  
“People make mistakes, Jughead. Adults make mistakes. I know you know that. (Too well, his eyes say, sad and hurt, and Jughead looks away from them) I love you and I want the best for you and I will always try to help you. And I need you to remember that about me, about FP, about everyone. even the ones who hurt you. But I was unfair and it was my fault, and I don't want you to forgive people just because they're older than you or say nice things.”  
  
“I'm not. I forgive you because I know you mean it.”

Fred’s thumb brushes the back of his hand, pours warmth into the skin. He isn’t finished.  
  
“Jughead, the things I said about you were things that my dad said about your dad once.”    
  
Jughead sees how far back it goes. The hurt.  
  
“But people aren't their parents. I know that now. Your friend Veronica's not her mom. Cheryl's not her father. You're not your dad. Archie's not me.”

Maybe if he’s lucky, thinks Jughead, squeezing back and feeling the awful rope of tendons under the flesh, holding on anyways because Fred had offered his hands to him and that mattered. Because Fred’s hands are shaking and maybe if he holds tight enough they’ll stop.  
  
“I don't believe the things I said about your family. I didn't then and I don't now. Not rationally. But deep down I did once, and I still do if I'm not thinking about it. And I believed about other people's families in the same way because I grew up all my life hearing things and being told things and then you don't question them.”  
  
“You're talking about bias.”  
  
“Maybe. Yeah, no, I am. Because that stuff is in deep in this town. People like Clifford Blossom treat me a certain way and i thought I knew how it worked. I'm not perfect, Jughead.”  
  
Fred's hands are sweating, and he squeezes them tight.  
  
“You're pretty damn great, though.”  
  
“I'm sorry. For that night.”  
  
“I forgive you.”  
  
Fred smiles, a watery, tired-eyed smile. “Friends?”  
  
“Friends.”  
  
“Family?”  
  
The lump in his throat makes it hard to talk, but he manages the one word. “Family.”  
  
Fred smiles again, then, half-rises from his seat like he wants to go for a hug but then sits down anew like it's too much to hope for. Jughead gets up and goes to him instead.  
  
He can feel Fred trembling when he hugs him. Jughead's not a hugger but Fred is, so he tries to put everything he can into it, hugs him like he's the last man on earth.  
  
"Thanks kiddo," says Fred shakily when Jughead's vice-like grip still hasn't abated.  
  
Jughead doesn't say anything. There are hot, wet tears running straight and true down his cheeks and into his shirt collar, and his nose and mouth are so clogged and choked off that he's not sure he can breathe, let alone reply. But he feels a lightness in him, a freedom, maybe. Hes west of Memphis, but the dogs aren't coming any time soon. He's walked through Robin Hood Hills and he knows he's innocent. And it's more than everyone else knowing, Keller knowing, _he_ knows it. Knows it deep in his bones.  
  
"Jug, hey, hey," says Fred, pulling back and wiping at the tears on Jughead's cheeks with his thumbs. "I'm sorry. Let's go get a milkshake, okay? I know I can use one."  
  
"Okay." He’s wheezing instead of breathing, breath hoarse and shuddery. "Okay.”

He takes two tissues from the box Fred offers him but only clenches them in his hands instead of using them. “You never-” he begins, chokes because of the tightness in his throat, tries again. “You never told me what flavour of milkshake was my dad’s.”

Fred smiles, slow and quiet and like he used to. “FP liked dark chocolate,” he tells him. “The darker the better.”

Maybe Fred's right about Jughead not being his father, then, because Jughead doesn't like dark chocolate. Jughead had wanted Oreo. When he tells Fred he even manages a wet smile that could have passed for a laugh. 

He checks out True Crime in the Twenty-First Century from the Southside branch of the library when he gets home.

The sun comes up the next morning and he breathes for the first time in a long time. 


End file.
